Feature announcement: A better DNS Settings page

Our DNS Settings page is, in many ways, at the core of what we do at Postmark. When you authenticate your domain with us it allows you to send from any email address on that domain, and it also ensure great delivery rates. It’s also a page that you’re likely to use only once, and then never again. So it’s important for it to be simple and easy to understand. The previous version of this page needed some improvement. It had a lot of text, and not enough assistance if something goes wrong. Here’s what it used to look like:

Today we’re excited to release a simplified DNS Settings page to make it easier to ensure great delivery for your email. But we didn’t stop there— we also made some backend changes to streamline how we authenticate domains for email sending. Let’s go through some of those changes.

The first thing you’ll see is that we now have a much cleaner and easier-to-understand layout for the records you need to add to DNS to authenticate your domains for sending.

The email nerds among you will immediately notice that something is missing… “Where did SPF go?” you ask. The TL;DR version is that it’s not required to set up an SPF record on your domain for good delivery through Postmark. We take care of that on our side. Here’s a slightly longer explanation…

Years ago when email standards were being formed, email providers used the SPF records of the From/Sender address domain to check for alignment. This meant that it was necessary for Postmark users to add a custom SPF record to their DNS in order to pass SPF alignment. This has since changed, and email providers no longer check the From field’s domain when evaluating SPF and determining the results.

The Return-Path domain is now used by receiving email domains to check for SPF alignment. This means your emails sent through Postmark will always pass SPF by default, without any action on your end, since the Return-Path of all emails sent through Postmark already includes our outbound sending IPs and SPF record.

Working with DNS records is never simple. One of the things we wanted to do with this release is help users fix common issues when they set up their records. Instead of showing inscrutable error codes, we now show actionable recommendations on how to fix problems, whenever possible.

At the bottom of the page you’ll now see some additional options and recommendations to make sure you’re getting the most out of authentication and monitoring through Postmark. We're also making it more seamless to sign up for our free DMARC reports.

We know that in many cases, the person who sets up an app’s Postmark account is not the person who has access to DNS Settings. So with this release we’re also making it easy to send detailed instructions to a teammate about the records that need to be added.

I know I say this every time, but I really mean it: we want to hear what you think of the new page now that it’s live. We’re always listening and making improvements based on your comments. Please let us know at support@postmarkapp.com if you have any feedback. Or if you’d like to have a face to face chat with me about it, feel free to set up some time here.